A video editing system is a system used for supporting a user's editing work on video data and/or audio data (AV data) and is generally realized by making a computer terminal including a general-purpose CPU, such as a personal computer, execute a predetermined application program. The video editing system records one or more pieces of AV data from a video camera or the like onto an HDD beforehand and edits one AV data stream therefrom. The edited AV data which has been compressed by a system or the edited AV data which is non-compressed data is recorded in a recording medium, such as an HDD or a DVD, within the same system, is transmitted for broadcast or the like, or is output to the outside through an interface, such as IEEE 1394.
The video editing system employs a variety of encoding schemes to compress and encode the AV data. As encoding processes of the AV data, a technique of employing a CPU (Central Processing Unit) to edit and decode the AV data and a technique of performing an encoding process using a chip or circuit dedicated to the encoding process are known.